The 1851 Christmas essay "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older" is a
transitional work, reiterating the visions in the fire of The
Christmas Books of the 1840s and anticipating the moral "seasonal offerings" of
the Extra Christmas Numbers of Dickens's weekly periodicals, from 1850 through 1867.
[Commentary continued below.]

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Passage Illustrated

Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we
will not so discard you! You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts,
and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of
immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing! [page 593]

Commentary

In successive illustrated anthologies, the essays do not receive pride of
place, although "A Christmas Tree" (1850) and "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older" (1851)
are often reprinted. The seasonal offerings that are specifically narratives in Household Words begin
with A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire in 1852, and
continue into the 1860s with the framed tales of All the Year Round, the last of the series being the
Charles Dickens-Wilkie Collins
collaboration No Thoroughfare (1867). The philosophical
qualities of "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older," published at Christmas 1851, connect
the short effusion with the highly descriptive and contemplative "A Christmas Tree" from
1850, the first of a series of nine essays by journalists such as Blanchard Jerrold,
Henry Wills, James Hannay, Charles Knight, F. K. Hunt, J. H. Siddons, Samuel Sidney, and
R. H. Horne. Many of these writers contributed to the second set of philosophical essays
in 1851, but the second series featured two new writers who became significant over the
decade, Harriet Martineau (who contributed "What Christmas is in Country Places," the
fourth essay) and George Augustus Sala (who contributed "What Christmas is
in the Company of John Doe," the fifth essay). Neither of Dickens's Christmas essays,
however, has leant itself to illustration, so that Furniss is one of the few illustrators
to realise passages in them. In the 1868 Library Edition and the 1911 Centenary Edition,
the two Dickens Christmas essays appear before the first of his Christmas stories, "The
Poor Relation's Story" from A Round of Stories by the Christmas
Fire (1852). Oddly enough, Furniss and his editor, J. A. Hammerton, have sandwiched
the essays between the last of the Mugby Junction pieces of 1866
and No Thoroughfare, suggesting that they regarded them as a
summing up of Dickens's sentiments about Christmas and its meaning in mid-Victorian
England. Entertaining and well written though it may be, the Dickens-Collins collaborative
novella is decidedly not a Christmas story, so that the companion essays would have been
out of place at the close of the volume. Perhaps owing to the publisher's assessment that
neither "A Christmas Tree" nor "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older" is technically a
fiction, the 1876 American Household Edition of
Christmas Stories and 1877 volume published in Great Britain
omit them entirely.

As Deborah Thomas remarks, and

as the narrator declares in Dickens' "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older"
(from the holiday number of Household Words for 1851), Christmas is a time for reminiscing of
the past, dreaming of the future, and envisioning what has never been, as well as for
opening one's affections to other human beings . . . . [35]

Furniss's keynote, then, of the waking dreamer before the Christmas hearth is what
Thomas terms an "emotional and imaginative release" (35-36) which Dickens termed "Fancy."
Since the essay is, as Thomas rightly proposes, "an impressionistic sketch" (71),
Furniss's nimble pen suggests myriads of old friends, family members, and children rising
in spirit from the fireplace, like the fairies in The Cricket on The
Hearth, a paean to the cherished Victorian conceptions of family and home. Thomas
also suggests that the waking dreamer has adopted an "idly speculative" (71) Bozzian pose;
however, Furniss conceives of the the drawing-room dreamer as similar in type and form to
the aged observer of life in Come and
remember with me! from his visual accompaniment for "The Child's Story" at the
beginning of the volume.

Whereas Dickens emphasizes the dreamer's constructing airy castles in imaginative
landscapes, Furniss has his aged figure (looking nothing like Dickens in the closing years
of his life) recalling characters from his youth, his only substantial companion being the
dozing bloodhound at his knee. Figures in eighteenth-century dress — presumably
parents or grandparents — stare out from the frame above the mantelpiece, pointing
towards scenes of courtship and the schoolroom, emblematic of young adulthood and
childhood respectively. Whereas the white-haired dreamer in mid-Victorian dress is static,
the figures in his vision swirl and dance, contrasting the passivity of age with the
exuberance of youth. It is, in total, a fine set piece on the beneficent effect of memory,
and the power of art (the paintings and the bust, upper right) and familiar objects to
help the older generation to construct meaning out of their lives. Furniss does not dwell
on thew particular figures that connect the dreamer's visions of byegone years with
actual people in Dickens's life such as his crippled nephew Henry Burnett ("a poor
mis-shapen boy," p. 592), who became the basis for Tiny Tim, but who died in 1848, the
same year in which Dickens published the last of the Christmas Books.